Last night I dreamed that I got banned from Hexbear for 24 hours and told to self-crit. Despite understanding pretty much immediately after the ban went into effect, what I had done wrong, and apologizing to the mod team for the inconvenience, I elected to refrain from all social media for those 24 hours in order to self-crit, which I did by literally time traveling.
The odd thing is that in all the other dreams I've had wherein I acted like an uncharacteristically horrible person, I was consistently horrible and completely powerless to stop my own bad behavior despite recognizing it; but this time I was literally given the superhuman ability of time travel in order to go the extra mile to make up for what was ultimately just one bad comment.
Easier said than done...
My suggestion is to have a book of bullshit on hand. Literally anything that has information you can look up. Whenever you open a tab to the thing you're trying to avoid, look something up in the book instead. A word in a dictionary, or some book about nature.
Incidentally, lately I have been really wanting a physical kanji dictionary and Norwegian-Japanese translation dictionary. I've also been handwriting a lot of notes in a physical notebook.
Really not that hard. Just have deliberately to fill the time with something more fulfilling which is pretty much everything else in existence tbh. During my year offline I started learning classical piano, got in better shape, read a shit ton of books, and became a pretty good cook. Once you break the habit it's honestly very easy to keep internet usage in check because it feels like a boring waste of time compared to whatever else you direct your energy towards. That's how it worked for me at least and why I'll always advocate for spending less time online whenever it comes up.
No, I do try to reduce my screen time in the ways I can, because those types of things absolutely are a lot more fulfilling — but the same obstacles that keep me from becoming a vegan also keep me from going offline. I don't know how precise I really could or should be, but to be as vague as possible, things would be considerably easier for me if there were a door immediately to my right.